Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by R. D. Laing (British Psychiatrist)

R. D. Laing (1927–89,) fully Ronald David Laing, was a British psychiatrist. An existential psychologist, he is celebrated for his alternative approach to the treatment of schizophrenia. His radical ideas on mental illness, family dynamics, and care in the community made a substantial impact on the counter-culture of the 1960s.

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Laing graduated in medicine and psychiatry from Glasgow University in 1951 and then practiced as a psychiatrist in Glasgow 1953–56. He joined the Tavistock Clinic, London, in 1957 and the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations in 1960, and served as chairman of the Philadelphia Association 1964–82.

Laing became famous for his controversial beliefs on mental disorder with the publication of The Divided Self (1960.) His first proposal was that the mentally ill, and more particularly the people with schizophrenia, are not necessarily maladapted. Their psychotic disorders are likely defensive reactions to the stresses of the world, especially in the context of complex close-knit relationships within the patient’s immediate family.

Throughout much of his career, Laing was interested in the underlying causes of schizophrenia. He came to be known as the father of the antipsychiatry movement. He stressed that people’s modern implication of “normality” creates and then masks a profound intrinsic loss. He was opposed to the prevailing treatments for people with schizophrenia, such as hospitalization and electroshock therapy. He further examined the inner dynamics of schizophrenia in The Self and Others (1961) and co-authored Sanity, Madness, and the Family (1964.) Laing modified some of his positions in later years.

Laing writings extended from psychiatry into existential philosophy, and later into poetry. His other books include The Politics of Experience (1967,) Knots (1970,) The Politics of the Family (1976,) Sonnets (1980,) and The Voice of Experience (1982.) Wisdom, Madness, and Folly: The Making of a Psychiatrist, 1927–57 (1985) was autobiographical.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by R. D. Laing

Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.
—R. D. Laing
Topics: Children

Insanity: A perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
—R. D. Laing
Topics: Insanity, Sanity

We are all murderers and prostitutes—no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.
—R. D. Laing
Topics: Human Nature, Humanity

The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
—R. D. Laing
Topics: Madness

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
—R. D. Laing
Topics: Change

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
—R. D. Laing
Topics: Insanity, Madness, Sanity

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
—R. D. Laing

In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie.
—R. D. Laing

Creative people who can’t help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.
—R. D. Laing
Topics: Creativity, To Be Born Everyday, Risk-taking

We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world—mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.
—R. D. Laing

The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances. But it seldom extends to all men. In the name of our freedom and our brotherhood we are prepared to blow up the other half of mankind and to be blown up in our turn.
—R. D. Laing

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and there is a 100% mortality rate.
—R. D. Laing
Topics: Life

The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always.
—R. D. Laing
Topics: Honesty

From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.
—R. D. Laing
Topics: Babies

True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be honest. False guilt is the guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.
—R. D. Laing

There is no such ”condition” as ”schizophrenia,” but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.
—R. D. Laing
Topics: Mental Illness

Normality highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
—R. D. Laing

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.
—R. D. Laing
Topics: Mental Illness

Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
—R. D. Laing
Topics: Love

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